This bill is incredibly dangerous and needs to be killed quickly.  While many of us would like to be evaluated in our jobs without our employer looking at data regarding whether we were doing it well or not, that's not the real world (thank goodness).  The primary job of teachers is to impart knowledge to children, so obviously the crucial decision whether to grant a teacher lifetime tenure should be rooted in an evaluation of whether a teacher has demonstrated this ability -- and one critical way (though certainly not the only way) to evaluate this is to look at test scores.  Yes, test scores are imperfect, yada, yada, yada, but it would be insane to legislate that they cannot be used!  (By the way, regardless of the merits of this proposal, this issue should be negotiated at the local level, not legislated at the state level.)

 

For all of the crying and whining about tests, I've never heard anyone claim that when a test says a child can't read, it's wrong and the child, in fact, is a good reader.  And when the majority of African-American and Latino 4th graders in this country are testing Below Basic, meaning they struggle to read a simple children's book, we can't take tests off the table.

 

Most people think the schools we're fighting to change are the violent, gang-infested high schools you see on TV or in movies, but in fact the greatest danger are what Howard Fuller calls "happy schools" -- the halls are largely quiet, the rooms are bright, the principal is happy, the teachers are happy, the parents are happy and the students are happy,  There's only one problem: the children can't read and are many years below grade level!!!!  It's the thousands of elementary schools like these that inevitably lead to the high schools like those described above.

 

The single best way (though, again, not the only way) to identify and fix happy schools is to get data (that means testing) and then use it sensibly in a variety of ways: to let parents know how their children are really doing, granting teachers tenure, evaluating and promoting teachers and principals, rewarding the best teachers, etc.

While the state was consumed by the downfall of Eliot Spitzer last week, the Assembly passed a bill that would pre-emptively bar New York City and other school districts from linking teacher tenure to students’ test scores.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said on Monday that she had not pressed for the legislation, though she was, of course, supporting it. Some legislators said they were taken by surprise to learn that the provision was tucked into the huge budget bill passed by the Assembly last Wednesday.

But the Bloomberg administration, which has embarked on an ambitious experiment in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests, is now fighting.

A spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s legislative office in Albany, Farrell Sklerov, said: “To make sure kids have the best possible teachers, we need to look at all available data. Teachers should be accurately evaluated with information about how well they’re helping students learn. We cannot afford to restrict the city’s ability to set high standards.”

The legislation would require that decisions on teacher tenure follow standards set by the state’s Board of Regents. That would make it impossible for local districts to add their own measures, like including student academic performance and improvement in the judging of teachers.

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March 18, 2008

Bill Would Bar Linking Class Test Scores to Tenure

By JENNIFER MEDINA

www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/nyregion/18teacher.html

While the state was consumed by the downfall of Eliot Spitzer last week, the Assembly passed a bill that would pre-emptively bar New York City and other school districts from linking teacher tenure to students’ test scores.